India holds the number one spot for the highest number of monthly Opera Mini users worldwide, so, in this month's State of the Mobile Web report we take a closer look at mobile web trends in that country.

By using anonymous and aggregated data from the Opera Mini servers, we have mapped out surfing habits in different regions and cities of India to see where the differences lie. The Opera Mini browser is a mobile phone web browser designed to deliver the very best web experience on basic mobile phones to the latest iPad. Our compression technology, aided by our globally distributed data centers — make the full web accessible for all kinds of mobile phones. This, in turn, makes it possible to tabulate very accurate statistics based on the content of websites visited.

The latest data show that the list of international webpages, such as Google, Facebook and YouTube, have remained largely the same across all of India. But for India-specific websites, there were larger differences. Having a large user base for international websites such as Google and Facebook in India, signifies the importance of search and social media in the Indian market.

After examining other regions, such as Africa, South East Asia and Latin America, there are subtle differences in India that are not observed inside other countries. Since India is such a large country and market, with a very diverse population, the differences in the selected regions are quite interesting. For example, we see that some types of websites are popular in all of India, such as the Indian railway system's website. In other categories, such as news websites, there are more remarkable differences. In addition to one or two national news websites, there is a strong presence of local news media.

In the regional data, we see that interest in education is a strong motivator to go online. Among the most visited domains in several regions are universities and schools, whose websites are often used to check the grades of students. Until recently, such data was published in newspapers, but easily accessible internet eliminates the need to wait for tomorrow's newspaper. In the Indian domain list, the high season for the educational websites are March/April and September/October, when students are checking their grades.

Also very strong in the Indian market are content download sites for mobile phones. Websites such as Mobile9 and Zedge offer mobile users a way of customizing their mobile devices with wallpapers, ringtones and much more.

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